It is common for businesses and homeowners to have a security system for detecting alarm conditions at their premises and reporting these to a monitoring station. One of the primary functions of the monitoring station is to notify a human operator when one or more alarm conditions have been sensed by detectors installed at a monitored premise.
Detectors may vary from relatively simple hard-wired detectors, such as door or window contacts to more sophisticated battery operated ones such as motion and glass break detectors. The detectors may all report to an alarm control panel at the premises. The control panel is typically installed in a safe location and is connected to a power supply. The control panel is further in communication with the individual detectors to communicate with or receive signals from individual detectors. The communication between the alarm control panel and the detectors can be one or two way, and may be wired or wireless.
Upon being notified of a detected alarm condition, the control panel typically places a phone call to a monitoring station whose telephone number has been pre-programmed into the panel. At the monitoring station, the call is received by a complementary interface. Thereafter, the panel notifies the interface at the monitoring station using a protocol understood by both the panel and monitoring station.
As the telephone number (or numbers) of the monitoring station is (or are) publically accessible, accidental facsimile transmission may periodically be made to the monitoring station. Transmission of the facsimile may stop quickly if the sender realizes the mistake, or may not stop if the sending facsimile machine is left unattended. In the latter case, the facsimile machine may flag a communication failure and may attempt to re-send the facsimile, thus tying up resources of the monitoring station. For example, the facsimile machine may continue to call the monitoring station and may tie up several lines.
Presently, upon receiving a call carrying a signal of unrecognizable form, monitoring stations simply produce either a “no data” indicator or a communications data failure indicator. Both indicate that a call was received but no signal was decoded, or that the signal did not have valid data, but do not indicate why. These failure indicators may then be flagged to operators for manual processing. For example, the automatic number identification (ANI) or caller ID (CNID) of the originating device may be decoded from the call and passed to an operator. The operator may try to call the ANI or CNID number only to receive a facsimile tone.
Accordingly, there is a need for an alarm monitoring station that better handles facsimile signals.